Secretary of State Blinken, a reliably leftist hack, goes off-script about Hamas

Secretary of State Antony Blinken has been a reliably left-leaning mouthpiece for the Biden administration on every issue, including the administration’s fatuous, anti-Israel demands for a two-state solution. I neither like nor respect him. However, in the “credit where credit is due” department, Blinken deserves props for saying something important: Namely, that a world that insistently demands that Israel surrender in this war does not make any such demands on Hamas.

This video (transcription immediately below) shows Blinken tacitly acknowledging that, were Hamas to lay down its arms, Israel would stop fighting, and she most certainly would not go on a genocidal rampage through Gaza. Despite this, he says that all calls for a ceasefire are directed at Israel alone. No one in the world asks Hamas to stop fighting or to stop engaging in genocidal attacks against Israel:

US Secretary of State Blinken: “What is striking to me is that even as we hear many countries urging an end to this conflict, I hear virtually no one demanding of Hamas that it stop hiding behind civilians, that it lay down its arms, that it surrender. This is over tomorrow if… pic.twitter.com/UhxQrEbWUW

— Aviva Klompas (@AvivaKlompas) December 20, 2023

Israel has been very clear, including as recently as today, that it would welcome returning to a pause in the further release of hostages. The problem was, and has been and remains, Hamas.

They reneged on commitments that they made during the first pause for hostage releases, and the question is whether they are, in fact, willing to resume this effort.

We believe that, as we said from the outset, Israel has not only a right but an obligation to defend itself and to try to make sure that October 7th never happens again. Any other country in the world faced with what Israel suffered on October 7th would do the same thing.

What is striking to me is that, even as, again, we hear many countries urging the end to this conflict, which we would all like to see, I hear virtually no one saying…demanding of Hamas that it stop hiding behind civilians. That it lay down its arms That it surrender. This is over tomorrow if Hamas does that. This would have been over a month ago, six weeks ago, if Hamas had done that. And how could it be, how could it be that there are no demands made of the aggressor and only demands made of the victim?

To those who say that Hamas is merely fighting back and that Israel is the aggressor—meaning that Israel must stop in order for Hamas to stop—it’s worth noting what no American media is reporting: Hamas has an endless supply of rockets which it rains down non-stop on Israel’s civilian centers. Thus, while Israel goes out of its way to avoid Gazan civilian casualties and to engage only with the well-armed Hamas militia, Hamas, in turn, does everything it can to kill Israeli civilians.

As for Blinken, perhaps this rare moment of good sense and compassion may be tied to his stepfather. Blinken has often explained that he cannot be anti-Israel because his father survived the Holocaust. This is obviously untrue, given Blinken’s support for the anti-Israel two-state solution.

Still, maybe October 7 forced upon him an understanding of what his stepfather, Samuel Pisar, really experienced during WWII, beginning when Pisar was only 10 and ending with him escaping a death march when he was 16:

His parents and younger sister Frieda were murdered in the Holocaust. Pisar was sent to Majdanek, Bliżyn, Auschwitz, Sachsenhausen, Oranienburg, Dachau and ultimately to the Engelberg Tunnel near Leonberg. At the end of the war, he escaped during a death march; after making a break into the forest, he found refuge in a US tank. He is the only Holocaust survivor of the 900 children of his Polish school.

It’s one thing, if you’re a child, to hear your mother’s second husband (who helped raise Blinken when the latter was still a child) talk about the Holocaust. It may be just background noise, especially if you don’t have much in the way of imagination or compassion beyond the narrow parameters of leftist demands. It’s another thing entirely to see a Holocaust unfold before your eyes. May Blinken’s eyes open much more in the coming weeks and months.

Image: X screen grab.